“Och faer have yee been Chris? Nae sooner have ye moved tae Bonnie Scotland and ga’en us a taster o Scot’s culture than you’ve disappeared fae Ciao” Well my unadoring public, this loon’s been busy making a website. The technophobe numptee has finally registered his domain, got some hosting and built a site using something called html.
FIT’S IT CA’ED?
Oooohhh I can hear you all cry what’s it called. Well as a professional loafer and layabout, it could only be called one thing: borntoloaf.co.uk (and it’s listed on Ciao, but no-one’s written an op about it yet).
IN THE BEGINNING….
I used to use a free site builder website called webspawner.com for my site, but the webspace was limited and I was only granted one page, and loads of adverts. Webspawner is great if you want a no frills website built in seconds. It would be great to use to announce the next Ciao met on for example. But you also get a huge domain name. Mines used to be www.webspawner.com/users/borntoloaf Not exactly catchy, but now in line with being a loafer it’s much shorter as www.borntoloaf.co.uk
ON THE SEVENTH DAY…
With a huge push of encouragement from Craig at Ukwins, I took the plunge and put my hands into my deep pockets and bought a two years domain name and one year’s web hosting from seem.co.uk for £39-99 (separate op on this excellent company to follow). Great I thought, cheap website building. But then the mighty Craig spoketh and said of borntoloaf: “ah you must buyeth FrontPage”. Okay Craig, how much. £90………. After I stopped choking and my eyes stopped bulging, I asked the great one why. Well it does what is says on the blurb and will build a great site for you. Oh says I, the cheap skate Aberdonian (don’t let hubby read this Jill) I’ll no be paying that after forking out £40 and only getting 1p back for ice-cream and my bus fare home.
THE TIGHT ABERDONIAN GOES A LOOKING
So, with much graciousness to the great one I went looking in Smiths to see if one of the computer magazines had a freeware demo disc on the front cover for FrontPage. Alas no, but foresooth, in their book section, they had my saviour: “Create a Web Site for beginners” for only £6. Well I ran to the queue. With my WHSmith clubcard I even saved a few pennies (24pence I think)
NO FRILLY BITS: IT JUST DOES WHAT IT SAYS ON THE COVER
Anyone wanting to create a website should read this book, or buy my copy from me. It could almost be retitled Creating a website for numpties like Chris. It’s so easy to follow and, (big word coming up just thought I’d throw it in to look clever after calling myself a numptie) the taxonomy level increases as you, the reader and web site builder progresses through the book. It’s written by Rob Young who has an easy flow of narrative. You can almost hear his patient tones as you read one page, then go back again to re-read and understand as he guides you through the simple (!!!) process of building a website. He starts with the foundations as any good builder does then lays the bricks and mortar before decorating the finished product. So the first chapter may seem simple to us Ciaoers as it’s all about that scary place the World Wide Web. But then he quickly moves on to explain the bones of any website such as hypertext links and url’s (uniform resource locator), filenames and the beautiful (you’ll only call it that after great deal of abusive language and an eventual understanding) language of html codes (hyper text markup language) and tags. The only tag I used before, because webspawner did it all for me, was <p> in my guestbook to get a paragraph break, which a fellow Ciaoer (wigglypuff I think) kindly explained to me.
WALK WITH ME
A unique selling point and feature of the book is that the author gets us to build a website as we progress through the book. It easy enough to swap his words on the page for our own, and that’s what this numptee did for borntoloaf. When it comes to technology, I’m more of a Tegan than an Adric or Nyssa. Anyone seeing it a few weeks ago will have thought how basic it looked. But visitors who returned will have seen the site develop and mature as it blossomed under Rob’s expert tuition, all for £6. He too briefly mentions FrontPage, but forget that, if you have the patience to walk with Rob and complete the journey, then you should get a half decent website.
IT IS RATHER CUTE
The only other thing you will need is FTP (file transfer protocol) software. But this can easily be downloaded for free from the range at Lycos downloads. I choose cute ftp because it has a build in html programme. I got it free for 30 days and then had to buy it. But being a cannie Aberdonian I just went looking for another freebie and downloaded that one! This allows you to transfer your web files onto the web through the host company.
CONTINUING THE VOYAGE WITH ROB
So the bones were there and now he helped me flesh it out with fancy fonts and colours (Rob lists two pages of html colour names, which are great fun to try out). Just a few sentences of html coding and we were there. Then from one huge webpage my mentor taught me to link to others and I was away with a multi-paged website. As ever with the book it was easy to follow and in progression. One word about html coding though is that it needs to be spelt in the American way. So centre is spelt center, otherwise it won’t work. Finally Rob guides the reader thorough marketing the website and being known around the web by promoting the site (all for free using various free websites). The book is well indexed and I know I’ll be dipping into it now and again as my site develops.
THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING
Said hercule poirot in one of his famous cases. So I hope I have been a good disciple of Rob’s and that www.borntoloaf.co.uk is testimony to his teachings. There is a few drawbacks to his book, but remember it’s only £6. There is no graphics chapter so I haven’t learnt (yet) how to get a logo on my banner. But then he does have an extensive appendix of useful web sites where further free downloads, help and information can be sought. Nor did he teach me how to display photographs so that I can show the art mosaic prints that I give away each month as prizes (as well as other great prizes such as DVD’s and cinema tickets this month). But like I said it was £6 and a lot cheaper than FrontPage and I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
The ISBN number is: 0-130-65279-2
CIAOER I’D RECOMMEND THIS TOO
Has to be molelover so that she can put online details of her recent wedding, although she’ll have to get another resource to display her photos.
More details
How easy was it to read / get information from
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
